The outspoken former minister, who resigned from his role after the national referendum, despite it returning the result he was calling for, told the ABC the far-right Golden Dawn party could “inherit the mantle of the anti-austerity drive, tragically”.

“If our party Syriza, that has cultivated so much hope in Greece – to the extent that we managed to score 61.5% in the recent referendum – if we betray this hope and if we bow our heads to this new form of postmodern occupation, then I cannot see any other possible outcome than the further strengthening of Golden Dawn,” Varoufakis said.

Prime minister Alexis Tsipras “didn’t have what it took, sentimentally, emotionally, at that moment, to carry that no vote to Europe and use it as a weapon,” said Varoufakis.

“So I … decided to give him the leeway that he needs to go back to Brussels and strike what he knows to be an impossible deal. A deal that is simply not viable.”

Varoufakis said he stood back to allow his successor, Euclid Tsakolotos, and the Greek negotiating team work in Brussels.

“I know very well what it feels like to walk inside those neon-lit, heartless rooms, full of apparatchiks and bureaucrats who have absolutely no interest in the human cost of decision-making, and to have to struggle against them and come up with something palatable.”

Greece was “set up” by eurozone leaders in dealings to address the economic crisis, Varoufakis later told the New Statesman, adding Germany was responsible for the view of the Eurogroup.

“Oh completely and utterly,” he said. “Not attitudes – the finance minister of Germany. It is all like a very well-tuned orchestra and he is the director.”

Varoufakis has previously accused the EU of putting a bailout of French and German banks ahead of Greece’s socioeconomic viability.

After 15 hours of talks that stretched through Sunday night and into Monday, Greece walked away from the emergency summit of Eurozone leaders with a “compromise” bailout package.

Growing anger at the creditors’ wishlist played out on social media under the hashtag #thisisacoup, as the drastic demands made were presented as the price to pay if Greece was to stay in the European union.

The referendum result, and the government’s about-turn, has shocked Greeks who had overwhelmingly rejected the previous offer.

“I had assumed, and I believe so had the prime minister, that our support and the no vote would fade exponentially, but the Greek people overcame fear, they set aside their pecuniary interests, they ignored the fact their savings could not be accessed, and they gave a resounding, majestic no to what was in the end an awful ultimatum on behalf of our European partners,” Varoufakis said.

Tsipras must now take the measures, which include VAT reform, spending cuts, a pensions overhaul and €50bn in privatisation, to a hostile Greek parliament.

In the Athens municipal elections in 2010, Nikos Michaloliakos is elected in the municipal council. If there was ever doubt as to whether his organization had abandoned its neonazi views, they quickly disappear: at the end of a council session, the Golden Dawn leader gives everyone the nazi salute.

Not since Nuremberg has Europe seen a trial of fascists on such a scale. They stand accused of terrible crimes – including murder and in the dock of Korydallos prison will be 69 members of Greek neonazi party Golden Dawn, including all 17 of its MPs. Kevin Ovenden has the story.

The most important trial of fascist criminality since Nuremberg starts in Greece on Monday.

Arraigned before the specially constructed court in the grounds of the Korydallos prison, south of Athens, will be 69 members of the Greek neonazi party Golden Dawn, including all 17 of its MPs. The fascists managed to take third place in the general election in January.

The municipal council in the area is closing all schools and workplaces on the day. The mayor and councillors will join a broad spectrum of MPs, trade unions, immigrant groups and civil society organisations under the umbrella of the anti-fascist movement to march and rally outside the opening of the proceedings.

The public sector union federation ADEDY has called a four-hour strike for the morning so that its members can take part.

Underscoring the sense of unity, the message from two widely covered media conferences this week — one by the KEERFA anti-fascist and anti-racist movement, the other by the powerful Communist Party of Greece (KKE) — was identical: Golden Dawn is a violent criminal organisation masquerading as a political party. The prosecution must be supported. Not a millimetre must be yielded to the fascists’ attempts to relegitimise themselves in Greek public life and present themselves as some kind of anti-Establishment outsiders.

The senior governing party Syriza will hold a public meeting on Tuesday along the same lines with the party’s chief whip Nikos Filis.

While it is the state which has brought the prosecution, it did not do so of its own volition. Just months before Fyssas’s murder the public order minister of the then Antonis Samaras-led government threatened to sue veteran foreign correspondent of the Guardian Helena Smith because she reported how anti-capitalist protesters had been beaten in police cells by officers sympathetic to Golden Dawn.

They have skilfully utilised Greek legal procedure so that lawyers of the left and of the movement representing the victims of the fascists’ crimes will be co-plaintiffs in the trial. They will be able to call witnesses, cross-examine and lead evidence. They are also entitled to full disclosure.

Already that means that they have accessed tens of thousands of pages of evidence. The legal intervention by anti-fascist forces is more than a belt and braces approach to avoid a recent botch job by state prosecutors which allowed leading Golden Dawn thug Ilias Kasidiaris to walk free from charges arising from his televised assault three years ago on two women MPs — Liana Kanelli of the Communist Party and Rena Dourou of Syriza.

The previous government carefully set the cut-off date for investigating the fascists’ crimes as 2008. But Golden Dawn has been around since 1986. Its origins lie in the paramilitary Greek right going all the way back through the years of the military dictatorship of 1967-74, the Western-backed war against the Communist Party and the left in the 1940s to the collaborators with the nazi occupation of Greece, which was more brutal than anywhere in Europe outside of Poland and the Soviet Union.

Bringing to the light of day the dark recesses of the Greek deep state is not, as the parliamentary right claim, some vengeful settling of scores from the distant past. (Though why there should be a political statute of limitation on fascist crimes is a question they should be made to answer.) It is a matter of contemporary self-defence.

In the second general election of May 2012 analysis of the polling stations where the police, army officers and similar state personnel vote revealed that possibly 50 percent of the Athenian police force voted for the fascists.

That leaves the right with a time-honoured authoritarian law and order push. Whether over prison reform, policing or moves to end the inhuman conditions facing many immigrants into Greece, the elected right is seeking collaborators within the deep state and among dubious elements on the government’s side to undermine liberal reforms and to build a front against the government from the right.

Liberal elements of the centre have disgracefully succumbed to this authoritarian push. The parties of the centre left — Pasok and To Potami — this week voted against a Bill liberalising Greece’s cruel prison system.

And some liberal voices have raised the canard that the prosecution of Golden Dawn is in some way a violation of free speech.

But the prosecution has nothing to do with what Golden Dawn thinks or writes. It has to do with its actions, with the crimes it has committed — including murder.

Three major criminal cases are themselves a core part of the wider proceedings. They are the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, the near fatal attack on a group of Egyptian fishermen in the Perama area of Piraeus, the port of Athens, and a similarly ferocious attack in the same area on Communist-organised trade unionists of the PAME inter-union front.

In addition to reaching verdicts on these three crimes, the court will hear evidence about others where there have already been convictions. The prosecution will then seek to show that all of these crimes, committed by Golden Dawn members, are not incidental to their perpetrators’ membership of the organisation, but in fact flow from it.

The gist of the fascists’ defence is that the organisation cannot be held responsible for the criminal activity of its members. But Golden Dawn (GD) is not a chess club, where it would be unreasonable to hold the secretary responsible for the driving offences of one of its players.

The anti-fascist case is that the actual organisation of GD, its core around which all the trappings of a political party are merely a carapace, is a hierarchical, violent gang with a command structure organised on the national-socialist fuehrerprinzip — ie strongman rule from top to bottom.

Under the impetus of the mass movement the media have already publicised pieces of evidence showing that taking an oath containing this and other nazi doctrine is a required part of becoming a GD member.

The primary function in any branch or higher organisation of GD — all the way up to the fuehrer Nikolaos Michalokiakos — is the organisation of “security battalions.” That comes first and has precedence over the treasurer, secretary, press officer and all the other roles which normal parties or trade unions regard as the central officer functions.

Security battalions was the name given to the mass collaborationist force under Hitler’s occupation of Greece which rounded up partisans, Jews and others to be murdered.

There has never been a proper reckoning of the Establishment’s complicity in those crimes, the atrocities of the civil war, the murder of socialists such as MP Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963 (subject of Costa Gavras’s film Z), the junta and the “strategy of tension” violence against the left in the 1970s.

It is in this enforced historical amnesia that Golden Dawn has been allowed for 25 years to burrow silently until the circumstances of economic collapse and complicit, authoritarian, institutionally racist Establishment politicians allowed it to grow out of despair.

Not as principals, but as secondary aiders and abetters, stand the EU and troika bureaucracies in the political scope of this trial.

For it was their contempt for democracy which forced the imposition of Greece’s first unelected prime minster since the junta back in 2012. The government of central banker Lucas Papademos included the far-right LAOS party.

One of its MPs — now a poster boy for the right-wing New Democracy — was Makis Voridis.

He is a veteran fascist who sharpened his axe, literally, in physical assaults on left-wing students in the 1980s and before that was a leader of the Free Pupils school students organisation of the far right which terrorised left-wing teachers and pupils.

This trial will last a year. The Greek anti-fascist movement and its lawyers deserve the support of the labour movement and of the left across Europe.

As we approach the 70th anniversary of VE Day, crisis-wracked Greece is a reminder that democracy, liberal values and halting fascist barbarism are all far too important to be left in the hands of the capitalist Establishment and the politicians who serve it.

Kevin Ovenden is reporting from Athens thanks to the support of Philosophy Football. His book, Syriza — Escaping the Labyrinth, will be published by Pluto Press this September. To support the prosecution and anti-fascist movement in Greece go to www.jailgoldendawn.com.

Yanis Varoufakis, the country’s pugnacious new finance minister, ended his tour of European capitals with a tense press conference alongside Schäuble, who repeated his offer to send 500 German tax collectors to Greece to ensure wealthy Greeks pay their taxes and help tackle corruption.

After their meeting in Berlin, Schäuble said he and Varoufakis had “agreed to disagree”; but Varoufakis interjected: “We did not reach agreement because it was never on the cards that we would.”

Later, though he had promised to meet the alarmist warnings of some in the eurozone about the consequences of Syriza’s policies with “a frenzy of reasonableness”, Varoufakis issued a stark warning that ignoring the plight of his countrymen could stoke the rise of nazism.

Just prior to the Berlin meeting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had increased the pressure on eurozone policymakers by inviting the new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to talks in Moscow. Tsipras was asked to attend an event on 9 May to mark the end of the second world war.

…

German public opinion is deeply sceptical about the need for fresh debt relief for Greece, after repeated bailouts since 2010; but Syriza argues that far from being rescued, it has been burdened with a series of impossible-to-repay loans, and has seen growth hobbled by the austerity imposed as a quid pro quo.

Back in Athens, Tsipras told the Greek parliament: “Greece is no longer the miserable partner who listens to lectures to do its homework. Greece has its own voice.”

The €240bn bailout from the troika of the European commission, International Monetary Fund and the ECB – which came with stringent conditions, including hefty spending cuts – is due to expire at the end of February.

Syriza has insisted it will not accept an extension of the existing bailout programme; but the financial challenge facing the new government was sharpened on Wednesday when the ECB said it would limit access to emergency liquidity for its banks.

Apparently referring to that decision, which sent bank shares plunging, Tsipras said on Thursday: “Greece cannot be blackmailed because democracy in Europe cannot be blackmailed.”

OVER 6,000 youth and workers demonstrated last Saturday evening throughout the Athens city centre against a rally organised by the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party. Marchers held banners and shouted slogans for the ‘death of fascism’.

There were no police in sight at all during the march. The Greek government has stated that there will be no armed police at demonstrations. But riot police buses blocked the marchers’ way to the fascist gathering of about 200 people.

The Greek government has appointed Yiannis Roubatis as the head of the Greek Intelligence Service (KYP). In the 1980s, Roubatis was an advisor to PASOK Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and in the 1990s a Euro MP of social-democratic PASOK.

Now all Greek army, police and security services are in the hands of anti-working class right wingers.

Then the Athens University professor Yiannis Panousis, an ex-PASOK and Democratic Left parliamentary deputy, was placed Deputy Minister for Internal Affairs in charge of the police. In the past, Panousis has missed no opportunity to attack demonstrating youth and defend savage riot police violence.

On the same day, the Deputy Minister for Reforms, Yiorghos Katrougalos, met the Executive Committee of the ADEDY (public sector workers federation) and told them that there will be no restoration of wages and pensions this year at all.

GEORGE Osborne was likened to a student listening to his economics lecturer yesterday after a visit from Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. The [British] Chancellor met his Hellenic counterpart just over a week after Syriza swept to power amid anger over extreme austerity measures: here.

GREEK Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis announced yesterday the retention of capitalist asset management firm Lazard as adviser to his ministry on public debt and fiscal management: here.

Critics deplore Leni Riefenstahl footage of Hitler games in promotional video – as ministry stresses mistake should not detract from Greek tourism success

Helena Smith in Athens

Thursday 6 November 2014 18.24 GMT

The Greek government has been forced to withdraw a tourism video unveiled in London this week because it contained footage of the infamous 1936 Olympics held in Berlin under Hitler.

The offending clip, which depicted the torch lighting ceremony at the controversial pre-war games, would be “removed immediately” officials said, after being alerted to the gaffe by the Guardian. By last night the video had been taken down from YouTube.

“This was a commemorative video marking 100 years of the Greek tourism organisation, that was shown in the UK for the first time, and we wanted to include footage from the Olympic games,” explained the tourism ministry’s general secretary, Panos Livadas.

In a telephone interview from London on Thursday, where industry figures had gathered for the World Travel Market, the sector’s pre-eminent global event, Livadas added: “In the sequence, a scene from the 1936 Olympics was mistakenly included which we will immediately remove and rectify.”

The Berlin games, used by Hitler to promote racial superiority and the ideals of Nazism, were the first to portray the ceremonial relay of the Olympic flame.

At about eight minutes into the footage, (taken from a film compiled by the German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl), the Fuhrer’s favourite propagandist, a blond, blue-eyed athlete, meant to embody Aryanism, is seen holding the Olympic torch aloft as he skips up a stairway to light the cauldron. The scene lasts barely a second before an image of a more recent torch lighting ceremony appears.

Officials attributed the error to a technical oversight, saying it should not be given undue emphasis at a time when tourism, the mainstay of Greece’s otherwise crisis-hit economy, was doing extremely well.

Despite a precipitous decline in holidaymakers from Russia and the Ukraine, the Mediterranean country attracted more than 20 million visitors – almost double the entire Greek population – amounting to a growth rate of more than 16% this year alone.

“We have not just had a great reception here in London, we have had two back-to-back record years in terms of tourist arrivals and revenues,” said Livadas. “The rise will continue next year, which is great news for a sector that employs 700,000 people. And that is what we should be focusing on. That is what is important.”

But the video rapidly elicited an excoriating response from viewers, not least from some Greeks. In online exchanges many said the error had been exacerbated by the film’s hackneyed presentation of Greece as a land of gods, myths and ancient heroes.

At almost 12 minutes long the video, which inexplicably opens with a shot of New York and is narrated by an American (who participated as a US team member in the 1984 winter Olympics), includes almost no images of contemporary life, or young innovative Greeks.

“It is very tiring and after a bit irritates with its outdated aesthetics,” wrote Robin Savas Savidis in an observation posted beneath the video’s YouTube slot. “It is reminiscent of a cheap soap opera [with] optical effects that verge on the ridiculous,” he said, echoing a widely held view.

Deploring the decision to include the scene from the 1936 Olympic games, Ares Kalogeropoulos, another critic wrote: “It is perhaps the most repellent thing I have ever seen or paid for as a taxpayer.”

Members of the Jewish Youth of Athens (ENA) gathered on Sunday 2nd of November 2014 in order to erase the anti-Semitic graffiti which was written on the Holocaust Monument of Athens by the extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic organization “Unaligned Meander Nationalists” (Greek abbreviation: AME): here.

Greece: All 18 MPs elected with Golden Dawn in 2012 should stand trial for membership of a criminal organisation, a prosecutor said on Thursday, in a massive 698-page report (pdf) submitted to judges: here.

Antisemitic references were made by Golden Dawn MP Michail Arvanitis, in the Greek Parliament, during the session of Sept. 30, 2014, during which the Parliament passed in principle the draft Bill on “The organisation of the legal status of religious communities and their associations in Greece”: here.

Around 800 foreign farm workers of mainly Pakistani descent struck last week in the Greek town of Skala. The strike began on July 3 and lasted nearly a week. Skala is the local capital of the Evrotas municipality in the region of Lakonia, which is located in the southern part of the Peloponnese. The strike was called in protest against delays in payment, poor living conditions and racist treatment at the hands of the Greek police.

According to reports, migrant workers marched through the streets of Skala from the town hall to the police station where a protest was staged. Local paper Lakonikos reported that “the police authorities met with a delegation of the strikers along with [Pakistani Community leader] Javed Aslam as well as lawyer L. Fotakou…. The representatives of the migrants made specific allegations of ill-treatment and they will press charges in respect of these.”

Migrant farm workers are among the most oppressed sections of the working class in Greece. Last year, 30 or more workers were wounded in a shooting incident at a strawberry farm in Nea Manolada where 200 or so Bangladeshi workers gathered to demand the payment of wages they were owed. Four men are currently on trial for the incident—the owner of the farm, Nikos Vaggelatos, and the three gunmen accused of opening fire on the workers.

Pakistani workers in Skala had also struck in September 2010 after they returned from work and found the doors of their homes and shacks had been shut by their owners and employers and their possessions thrown into the street.

On July 1, a joint press conference was held by the Pakistani Community of Greece, the Immigrant Workers League, and the anti-racist campaign group KEERFA, on the Skala strike. Victims of police brutality in the town were also present. Statements from the press conference reported in the Greek media painted a picture that would not have seemed out of place in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

Ejaz Ahmed, a translator working with Doctors Without Borders, said, “They forbid them from sitting in the town square and at cafes, they forbid them from going to the beach to swim, to go to a barber shop or to rent houses. The very same people that call them ‘filthy’ force them to live in their dozens in chicken coops, in warehouses and in derelict buildings, while at the same time they ask them to pay 50 euros a month rent for these miserable living conditions.”

One migrant worker, Mohamed Asif, alleged he was assaulted 18 months ago by the mayor of Evrotas, Ioannis Grypiotis, and was then sent to a detention camp in Corinth: “After I got released and I returned to Skala, the mayor saw me again and ran towards me to hit me and started to threaten me. With this strike we feel bolder and I want to sue the mayor to find justice.”

Another worker, Nadim Asif, stated that he was assaulted by police three weeks ago after he had forgotten his keys and papers at home: “The policemen started to hit me and they broke my hand”. Asif is reportedly still in bandages and finds it difficult to work.

Ibrar Hussein who is married with one child said: “I went to the police station to have my signature verified. [A police officer] Fotis Manolakos or Babis was there and started to swear at me and told me to get out and he kicked me. No one dares to go there whether they have papers or not because they know that Babis will hit them, swear at them and maybe even send them to a detention camp”.

Rozuan Ahmed accused a policeman who goes by the pseudonym of “Mitsos” of assault: “He handcuffed me and took me to the station despite the fact that I have had legal papers for many years. After a while he let me go after kicking me and told me he did not want to see me again. You can only be at the farm, he told me. He has done this to many others during the last year.”

Zet Awla, an immigrant living in Skala since 1998, spoke about the extreme exploitation of migrants in Skala at the hands of local employers. He alleged that “Antonis Kyriakakos and Co. and the company owned by Giorgos Birakos owe over three years’ of wages, in excess of 50,000 euros, and they hand out cheques that bounce.”

In their treatment of Skala’s migrants, the local police are in fact playing a direct role in silencing opposition to the non-payment of wages. According to I Efimerida Ton Syntakton “police carry out raids in [migrants’] houses at the crack of dawn every Friday, which is pay-day, breaking doors, kicking and punching and hitting with truncheons.”

The brutality against migrant workers in Skala and the non-payment of their wages is intimately tied up with the collapse of the price of agricultural products in recent years with the workers being forced to bear the brunt of this. Speaking to agricultural journal Agrotypos.gr last week, Petros Bletas, president of the Agricultural Cooperative in Skala, said: “The reduction in the [orange] produce price this year was beyond the 30 percent mark in relation to the year before, which is the proportion required to break even. Last year, the average price was 40-50 cents per kilo on average and this year it’s 4-5 cents per kilo.”

With the strike reportedly having a negative impact on the local economy and with police brutality failing to effectively silence the workers, there are some among the local business community calling for calm. In a separate interview Bletas gave to Lakonikos, he stated: The police with its raids every Wednesday and Friday turn many workers away, who are necessary for the cultivation of the land.” He then called on the government to act and “grant working permits to Pakistanis so they can work legally and pay their state contributions like all other workers.”

Even if the migrant workers of Skala were given work permits, this would do nothing to improve their living standards. Speaking to I Efimerida Ton Syntakton, Deputy Mayor of Evrotas Ilias Panayiotakos was forced to concede that the 26 cents per 20-25 kilos of oranges picked that migrant workers received by working from 6 a.m. till nighttime was “what Greeks get as well. In any event, the situation is tragic, with prices being so low.”

In an effort to divert attention from this issue and prevent the strike from winning the support of the area’s Greek rural poor, the fascist Golden Dawn presented the strike as an Islamist takeover. The neo-Nazi Party has a strong presence in the Lakonia region where Skala is based. Commenting on the party’s results in the local and European elections this May, an article in To Vima stated, “In Lakonia, Golden Dawn’s result was 15.45 percent (7,637 votes), which made up its biggest share in all of Greece.”

A GREEK court convicted two strawberry farm employees today for shooting and wounding 28 migrant workers protesting about unpaid wages. However, the farm’s owner and head foreman were cleared: here.

Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party is sending deputies to the European Parliament for the first time. The respectability implied by parliamentary representation contrasts sharply with the criminal investigation launched after one of its supporters killed a left-wing rapper last September.

As this blog noted in an earlier post, Greek General Georgios Epitideios, who served as a senior staff member of Nato’s Central Command, and as director of the department of crisis response and current operations of the European Union Military Staff, was recently elected a Member of the European Parliament for the nazi Golden Dawn party.

Generals with nazi political views should not be expected to mind committing bloodbaths among peaceful anti-government demonstrators.

Only four days after this program was broadcast, the European General Affairs Council adopted provisions for Article 222, which is also called the “solidarity clause.” It said that the European Union would “mobilise all the instruments at its disposal, including the military resources made available by the Member States,” if “a member state is affected by a terrorist attack, or a natural or man-made disaster.” The decision allows for the deployment of Special Forces, paramilitary groups and various other “anti-terror” groups.

A disaster is defined as “any situation that has harmful repercussions on human beings, the environment or wealth assets,” according to an accompanying paper by EU High Representative Catherine Ashton. Strikes, demonstrations or uprisings endangering critical infrastructure, banks and corporations can also be included among the targets of military actions carried out by the European police and military.

Preparations for such operations are well advanced. Since the violent confrontations at the G8 Summit in Genoa in the summer of 2001 and the terror attacks in the US on September 11 of the same year, EU member states have systematically consolidated paramilitary forces suited to internal operations.

In 2001, 150,000 demonstrators from all over the world traveled to the G8 Summit in Genoa. A large squad of state security forces protected the heads of state or government of the leading industrial countries. Masked police provocateurs caused violent collisions, and security forces brutally confronted the demonstrators. One youth, 23-year-old Carlo Guiliani, was shot, over 500 people were injured and over 300 arrested. Property damage amounted to €40 million.

After the September 11 terror attacks, the EU-funded ATLAS Network of special police forces was founded. Today, all 37 elite units are hosted by the EU, including the German GSG 9. The network coordinates common training and exercises.

The “Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units,” a training center for police units “especially trained in the handling of violent uprisings,” as political scientist Christian Kreuder-Sonnen explained, has been located in the northern Italian city of Vicenza since 2005. European, American and African policemen are prepared here for deployments in war areas. The centre is mainly financed by the United States.

The European Gendarmerie Force (EGF), founded in 2006, also has its headquarters in Vicenza. Eight European states are represented in the EGF, and Turkey has observer status. The conditions of deployment of the EGF are extremely flexible: it can be placed under the command of the EU, the UN, NATO, or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It has been deployed to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Haiti.

In 2008, the French Gendarmerie started a project together with the European Commission, in which police and members of the Gendarmerie from different EU countries trained together. Two years later, an exercise took place under the leadership of the German Federal Police in the armed forces barracks near Potsdam.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, the growth of the European security apparatus has accelerated. According to the British civil rights organization Statewatch, the budget of the ATLAS Network recently increased five-fold.

The purpose of the network is not simply to carry out practice drills. Military and security forces will now be used against demonstrations and strikes, as they were against strikers in Greece and Spain. In March of this year, the anti-uprising units fired tear gas and rubber bullets on participants in a demonstration in Madrid of over a million people.

These preparations for mass repression are consciously viewed as a defense of the interests of the capitalist elite against mass uprisings of working class and poor people.

In the study entitled “Urban violence and humanitarian challenges”, the European Union Institute for Security Studies points to the “deep-seated inequalities in the distribution of economic, political and social resources which themselves are interrelated with poverty and are underpinned by globalisation and neo-liberal macro-economic and political processes.”

The “Perspectives for European Defense 2020”, by the same institute, see the task of future military deployments among other things in the “protection of the rich of this world from the tensions and problems of the impoverished … As the proportion of the world population that is impoverished and frustrated continues to increase, the tensions between this world and the world of the rich will increase—with corresponding consequences,” the statement predicts.

It adds, “Technology contracts the world into a small town that is on the verge of a revolution. While we have to deal with an increasingly integrated upper stratum, we are at the same time confronted with the growth of explosive tensions in the poorest lower stratum.”

For this purpose, soldiers are to receive realistic training in suppressing popular uprisings. The German armed forces are building a city named Schnöggersburg, an “urban conurbation” with 520 buildings on a plot of land north of Magdeburg, belonging to the Combat Training Center’s army. It includes a slum, an industrial area and a mosque, which can be turned into a church. After completion, EU and NATO combat units will practice waging war in the city.

In Germany, deployments of the armed forces against uprisings and social unrest have been subject to legal regulation for a long time. The emergency laws, passed in 1968 by the Grand Coalition, allow the deployment of armed forces “for protection against imminent dangers to free democratic principles.”

In 2007, the German armed forces were deployed to protect the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm. They supported the police in spying on demonstrators, as Tornado fighter jets overflew the protesters.